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Religious Expression and Crowdfunded Microfinance Success: Insights from Role Congruity Theory

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Abstract

Crowdfunded microfinance provides financial resources to impoverished entrepreneurs across the globe based on online appeals describing the entrepreneur’s values and venture potential and is considered a key player in the ethical finance movement. Despite knowledge that the content of the appeals impacts funding success, little is known regarding the role of religious expression, which is common and consequential in socially-oriented contexts. We leverage role congruity theory to address a theoretical tension concerning the effects of religious expression on crowdfunded microfinance funding outcomes. Religious expression is associated with perceptions of trustworthiness, rule-following, and ethicality—qualities that would suggest an entrepreneur would likely avoid opportunist behavior and repay the loan. However, appeals to a higher power may be incongruent with the role of an entrepreneur to the extent that such expression communicates a lack of proactiveness and self-reliance. We use a two-study design to help resolve this tension. Our field study incorporating 253,130 loans from Kiva reveals that religious expression negatively influences funding, particularly for women. Our experiment using 1,795 individual loan assessments shows that the negative influence of religious expression is attenuated when individual lenders exhibit higher levels of religiosity. Post hoc analysis suggests campaigns can mitigate the negative impact of religious expression by being careful to also include aspects highlighting an entrepreneurial orientation. Overall, our work extends prior research suggesting that language tied to ethical or virtuous behaviors is generally not rewarded by lenders as using such language may make the applicant appear inconsistent with role of a stereotypical entrepreneur.

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Notes

  1. Our results are robust to a variety of transformations such as an inverse hyperbolic sine (ihs) transformation, a dichotomous version of the variable equal to 0 for no expression and 1 for those with religious expression, and a dichotomous version of the variable equal to 0 when expression was at or below the mean and 1 for those with expression above the mean.

  2. To assess the efficacy of our results, we used bootstrapping procedures to iteratively draw smaller samples from the population of loans in our study. To estimate our bootstrap results, we selected base samples of 25% (n = 63,250) of the available loans, 20% (n = 50,600) of the available loans, and 10% (n = 25,300) of the available loans. We use 1000 replications for each. Thus, our models were estimated 1000 times using a different random sample comprised 25%, 20%, and 10% of the sample, respectively. The results from these estimations were wholly consistent with our original results.

  3. We assessed the robustness of our moderation results in five different ways. First, because loans to women make up approximately 80% of the loans in our sample, we used Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) to generate weights akin to an even gender split and to correct for country level imbalances, then estimated our GLM models using these weights. Note that the survival models do not allow for use of these weights. Second, after performing the initial CEM, we estimated our results within the retail sector. We did so to mirror Study 2, which uses an experimental manipulation drawn from the retail sector. Third, we drew a random sample of 15,000 campaigns by gender, resulting in a balanced sample of 30,000 campaigns with 50–50 distribution for men versus women and estimated our results. Fourth, using the balanced sample, we then estimated the models only using retail sector campaigns. Finally, because the number of loans originating from a given country and the gender distribution of loans from a country can both vary considerably, we sought to ensure that our results were not being driven by the countries with the most amount of loans. Accordingly, we a) dropped the country with the most loans from the sample (Philippines) b) dropped the country with the second with most loans (Kenya), and c) retained only countries with under 2,500 loans (n = 39,857), which corresponds to excluding the top 25 countries with the most loans. In all scenarios, our original results were supported.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, 2900 Lubbock Avenue, Fort Worth, TX, 76109, USA

    Aaron H. Anglin

  2. Entrepreneurship Research Institute, TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstr. 21, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Hana Milanov

  3. Department of Management, G. Brint Ryan College of Business, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 76201, USA

    Jeremy C. Short

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Appendix

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Table 6 Examples of religious expression in kiva loan appeals
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Table 7 Centrality of Religion Scale (5-item)
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7, and

Table 8 Predicted funding speeds in days for entrepreneurial orientation and religious expression interactions in Kiva sample
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8.

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Anglin, A.H., Milanov, H. & Short, J.C. Religious Expression and Crowdfunded Microfinance Success: Insights from Role Congruity Theory. J Bus Ethics 185, 397–426 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05191-1

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